Prometheus lights up v2.17.0

Prometheus lights up v2.17.0

Prometheus has hit version 2.17.0, with the team behind the CNCF-backed monitoring and analytics project highlighting changes to its underlying time series database (TSDB).

The latest version comes barely a month after the team released v2.16.0, and the changelog lists one new feature and 11 enhancements in total.

The one new feature listed is the implementation of isolation in TSDB – something which has been on the project’s wishlist for some time. This means “API queries and recording rules are guaranteed to only see full scrapes and full recording rules.” 

However, there is a cost in resource usage, with the release notes saying “Depending on the situation, there might be some increase in memory usage, CPU usage, or query latency.”

Enhancements include allowing more keywords as metric names in PromQL, the project’s query language, and the addition of normalization of localhost URLs in the targets page in the React UI.

There is also a promised improvement in query performance in TSDB “for queries that partially hit the head”. We’re assuming this isn’t in the nautical sense.

There are eight bug fixes in this edition. Two of these relate to the React UI, which was introduced back in November on an experimental basis.

One of three React fixes is for a bug that meant the fixed data table for a matrix was always showing 1 as a value. The other targeted an issue that meant the new targets page wouldn’t load when jobs had invalid CSS characters in them.

Other fixes include three scrape issues, including a bug that in certain situations caused ‘superfluous response.WriteHeader call’ errors when scrape failed. Another squashed bug caused crashes when reloads were separated by two scrape intervals.

You can see the full changelog here.